L.A. Times does Tom Cruise

The L.A. Times ran a large Tom Cruise/Scientology story Sunday, but the whole affair is just a rehash of pieces that appeared in Radar magazine and on Salon.com

What left me thinking "huh?" in Sunday's L.A. Times piece was all the talk about excessive pampering for Tom Cruise and Scientology leader/Cruise buddy David Miscavige. So what if the leader of a large, profitable religion and its most well-known adherent get a lot of special treatment? And it's no news that the worker bees of Scientology do a whole lot for a little, all the while signing "billion-year contracts." It's also no news that the advanced teachings of Scientology are wacky.

What I want to know about is the money, what happens to the lives of the regular Scientology people, how the lower-level Scientology "celebrities" are treated, and what kind of proselytizing is done in the many Scientology splinter organizations (which, like Narconon, often don't mention Scientology in their names) that are concered with drug abuse, education and especially the organization's fight against psychiatry.

And it took the Times about 40 inches of copy before they mentioned a few other celebrity Scientologists in the context of the religion's recruitment efforts among actors and musicians. In the case of singer Beck, his parents were/are Scientologists, as are/were the parents of current Scientology celebrities Juliette Lewis, Danny and Christopher Masterson, Giovanni Ribisi and Erika Christensen. Would be nice to hear about how celebrities present and hopeful, are treated. Some say that you can get a leg up in Hollywood by joining Scientology and networking through the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.

Still, kudos to the Times for covering the subject at all, even though I got all I needed from Radar a couple of months ago.